Augmented reality is about as cutting-edge as the green screen in Titanic. OK, that’s a slight exaggeration, but the tech is moving fast. Get ready for the mixed reality revolution.
“Instead of carrying stylish smartphones everywhere, we’ll be wearing stylish glasses…these glasses will offer AR, VR, and everything in between, and we’ll wear them all day and we’ll use them in every aspect of our lives”
Michael Abrash, Head of Research at Facebook
When Pokémon Go was first released back in the summer of 2016, it seemed like the whole world was obsessed. Within days of its release, the app had caught on like wildfire.
During the peak success of the augmented reality app, it wasn’t out of the ordinary to walk into a park, or any other public space, to find tens or hundreds of people glued to their smartphones, frantically trying to catch ‘em all.
No. 1 first week app downloads in history
Part of the reason behind this augmented reality gaming frenzy was the nostalgia factor that the app offered its users. True, it also ‘got people outside’, but that wasn’t why we were playing it. Let’s face it, if you could catch an Eevie from the comfort of your bed, you’d do it.
No. For many people, the magic of Pokémon Go lay in the fact that playing it was like being a kid again, only better. This time we weren’t just collecting cards or watching it on TV; we were able, using only the cameras on our smartphones, to have the characters appear in our world, and to exist, in some way, in our own reality.
Like Snapchat, Pokémon Go gave us a way to enhance our everyday realities by injecting artificial, cartoon-like objects onto them. It was a kind of futuristic 90s revival, and pretty much everybody loved it.
That is – until they didn’t.
People seemed to realise that it wasn’t that practical to walk around staring at their phones all the time (cue Niantic’s polite reminder for users to ‘be aware of your surroundings’).
Worse still, people were getting bored. In a world of busy schedules and conflicting demands, there came a point when a universe that ceases to exist the minute we look up from our screens just wasn’t cutting it anymore.
As Devindra Hardawar, Senior Editor at Engadget points out, “as the first real example of AR consumer success to date,” there’s no denying the impact that Pokémon Go has had.
But what it also highlighted, he said during a live debate on the future of immersive technology earlier this month, was just how far the medium must go to improve.
Speaking with tech bosses at Samsung, HTC Vive and Tobii, Hardawar talked about what the future holds for VR and AR in entertainment, and in marketing.
During the debate, the one thing that each of the execs seemed to agree on, was the importance – and current lack – of real, human connection in augmented reality.
While all 3 took care to emphasise the huge advancements that have been made in the “growing ecosystem” of immersive technology over the last 2 years, the word on the street seemed to be that the vision we have for the future – of AR/VR lenses we wear all the time – is still quite a way off.
A reality escape (that’s not real enough)
Snapchat and Pokémon Go – and more recently, features like the Star Wars and Stranger Things stickers Google Pixel 2 (released at the end of last year) – are great for a bit of fantasy, but when it comes to facilitating more meaningful, or more useful interactions, it seems the technology isn’t quite there yet.
That said, developments over the last couple of years have seen a big increase in the number of augmented reality apps designed not just to entertain us, but to make our lives that bit easier, and our advertising experiences more relevant and varied.
In September 2017, Snapchat announced that their 3D World lenses would offer advertising opportunities to brands so that users could add the sponsored 3D creations to real life scenes through their cameras.
Around the same time, Apple revealed that they were bringing AR to the iPhone with their new ARKit. This Ios 11 framework has given developers a format to create apps that let you do things like design and test out a new car, place furniture anywhere in your surroundings, try your hand at 3D modelling, or even help track down your friends at a festival. Google has jumped on the bandwagon too, with their Android version, ARCore.
But the downside is, this all still needs to happen through a screen.
Faking human interaction
Rikard Steiber, President of HTC Vive, points out that right now, augmented reality is limited because it relies on putting objects into your field of vision, through an interface – usually a camera – but this alone doesn’t transform our experiences:
“AR today is augmenting your camera by injecting some digital objects, but it is not augmenting your reality. Right now, you are just gaining more information.”
Technology President at Tobii, Oscar Werner, agreed that the problem we have with augmented reality today is that it doesn’t – yet – replicate or facilitate true human interaction.
Although, as he went on to say, “when it does, the result will be massive. The next level we are aiming for is lenses…and that’s when it will become ubiquitous and replace the screen. This will be a true revolution.”
But hang on. If what we really want are immersive experiences that enable us to communicate, engage and empathise with others, don’t we already have it? Isn’t that what VR already does?
Well, not quite.
Augmented dreams / anti-social nightmares
At the F8 conference in April last year, Mark Zuckerberg said that “the power of VR lies in empathy.”
As well as describing the new Oculus Go as “the most accessible VR experience ever,” he offered up his vision of having 1 billion people living in the medium in the future, enjoying wholly immersive experiences that offer millions of people the chance for true emotional connection.
But the ironic thing about VR right now, is that it’s fairly anti-social.
Steiber points out that “with VR, your reality will change. You will really think and feel that you are in the experience,” and this is amazing, but it’s not without its pitfalls.
Immersive VR experiences might be life-changing while you’re in them, but add in the bulky headsets, simulation sickness, and finite field of vision, and things get a little less magical.
“No matter how good VR gets, few people would be comfortable socialising in person with someone whose eyes they can’t see, and social acceptability is an absolute requirement for anything we wear in public.”
Michael Abrash, Facebook’s Head of Research
The space between: a mixed reality
Tom Harding, Samsung’s Director of Immersive Products, says that in the future, there’s going to be a “fundamental point of convergence” between VR and AR, eventually resulting in a kind of hybrid combination of the two – a ‘mixed’ reality.
During the Engadget debate, Harding and Steiber described this as a kind of ‘pic ‘n’ mix’ approach, that builds on the “snackable”, episodic culture of Youtube and Netflix, to give users an experience that is accessible, meaningful, and most significantly, relevant to them.
For Rony Aborvitz, founder of the illusive multi-billion dollar AR start-up Magic Leap, the formula for this is simple. We need to change the way we think about what immersive technology, what it does, and what it looks like – putting people first, not technology.
In a blog post under the ‘Stories’ section of the Magic Leap website, Aborvitz wrote:
“What we are building is meant to amplify you. The team at Magic Leap is fighting hard each day to make a new computing platform, one that steps closer to making technology feel like it is part of your everyday life, expressing the best of your practical day and opening the door to your creative, inner life.”
Set to release their ‘Lightwear’ mixed reality goggles at some point this year, the company have said that eventually, their aim is to develop a combined technology that can be worn every day like glasses, and is attuned to the user in every way.
The future of VR and AR technology
So, it seems that eventually, the future of immersive tech won’t be VR or AR, but a much more sophisticated, hybrid version of the two.
In mixed reality, things won’t simply move into and out of our worlds in an imposing, or abstract way, and they won’t just be there to entertain. Eventually, these objects, images and advertisements will be useful, practical, engaging, and most significantly, relevant to the people who experience them.
But when you think about this on a practical level, implementing costs and timescales and good old human capability, is it really possible? After all, Aborvitz himself described his visions for the future of Magic Leap as a “flight of fantasy and dream.”
By all accounts from those in the know, I think the answer is yes.
Immersive technology as we know it is changing, moment by moment, and in the near future, it will be bigger, better and more life-changing than ever before.
One day, not too far from now, we’ll have Alexa, Siri and Ok Google – or whatever their future counterparts become – but they won’t just be a blue light or a floating voice that only works when it’s plugged into the wall. They’ll be able to appear, walk and talk with their users ‘face-to-face’, in a way that replicates real life, human interaction.
The mixed reality revolution is coming. It’s only a matter of time.
Sources
https://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/features/magic-leap-10-more-things-you-didnt-know-w514535
https://www.engadget.com/2017/12/20/vr-and-ar-in-2018/
http://www.augment.com/blog/virtual-reality-vs-augmented-reality/
https://www.wired.com/story/future-of-augmented-reality-2018/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/03/10-most-influential-wearable-devices
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/11/oculus-go-virtual-reality-facebook
https://www.wareable.com/ar/magic-leap-need-to-know-release-date-price-specs-features
https://www.wareable.com/headgear/the-best-smartglasses-google-glass-and-the-rest
https://www.magicleap.com/stories/blog/creativity-and-imagination
http://www.techradar.com/news/this-may-be-the-best-apple-arkit-application-weve-seen-yet
Penned in Purple 